


storm-shatter

by ninemoons42



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: (Run by BTS), Alternate Universe - Modern: No Powers, Ambiguous Relationships, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Drug Use, Drugged Sex, Emotional Hurt, Explicit Sexual Content, Heavy Angst, Inspired by Music, Inspired by Run (Music Video), M/M, Zine: Eos Compendium (Final Fantasy XV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-23
Updated: 2020-03-23
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:29:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23285545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: How did he get here? How did he even get through the door in the first place? Where is the coat he’s certain he was wearing? The weights in his pockets, the last bits and pieces of the things he’s almost certain are still his. The weight on his shoulders of -- too many memories, too many secrets and he had been so close to losing them all, out there on the sidewalk, in here where the music splinters into deafening rhythm and the screaming vocals.
Relationships: Prompto Argentum/Ignis Scientia
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11
Collections: Eos Compendium





	storm-shatter

**Author's Note:**

> I was one of the writers selected to be featured in the [Eos Compendium](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Eos_Compendium_Zine)! I'm glad I had the opportunity to join, and I'm glad to have the chance to post now~
> 
> *****
> 
> The frankly amazing art that was created to go with this fic is now online: click [here](https://twitter.com/neutruel/status/1242576911940886528?s=19) \-- and don't forget to show [@neutruel](https://twitter.com/neutruel) some love!
> 
> *****
> 
> _Read all the tags carefully before proceeding!_

He -- can’t remember the transition. One moment he’s exposed on the sidewalk, wind dragging its teeth down the back of his neck. Crown of thorns against the tender exposed portions of his scalp. His hair in its crude undercut, and the home-bleach job that had been necessary so he could slash flame-red streaks into the longer pieces left above the tops of his own ears. It feels so strange, for the arms of his eyeglasses to scrape against skin. To turn his head and actually feel the chains dangling from his ears in their full movement, ends clanging together.

Sidewalk-cracks at his feet, and brick-dust deep in the gutters. Hammering dry heat -- but he can already feel the break in the weather coming on. Flinch, at the glimpse of lightning that tears through the mud-gray skies. Night doesn’t stop the choking clouds in their oncoming fleeing weight from being visible; night is the perfect backdrop for the smog to be visible and against that sickly green, the huge silent shattering. The ionizing sky that raises the hairs all along the exposed portions of him. Nape, forearms, ankles -- the weight of the lightning and of the humidity -- the latter coating every breath in heavy dripping heat -- 

From the moment of feeling like he’s falling apart, too, beneath the sky that twists in the fan-lines of lightning-faults -- to the moment of neon-blindness and spun-sugar smoke. Vision cracking along the straight-beams, straight-shafts, of oscillating lasers. The dizzying burn of strobes switching from color to color to color and then to blinding white, and he almost thinks he’ll choke because he can’t fucking keep up. Can’t fucking adjust and he’s no better than sightless and lost, even in this stupid cramped corner, his hand clutching a tumbler, his knuckles going numb. 

How did he get here? How did he even manage to -- get through the door in the first place? Where is the coat he’s certain he was wearing, had woken up still clutching? The weights in his pockets, the last bits and pieces of the things he’s almost certain are still his. The weight on his shoulders of -- too many memories, crammed into his sleeves. Too many secrets and he had been so close to losing them all, out there on the sidewalk, in here where the music splinters into deafening rhythm and the screaming vocals -- maybe they’re singing, he can’t tell any more, the world is too loud and there’s too much nothing ringing between his ears.

Enough that he could probably let himself drown, enough that maybe it’s actually a good idea for him now to drown -- he wants to hurry the process along and -- 

Someone is patting down his pockets -- arms cording around his torso and -- no, he can’t lash out, can he? He knows the weight that’s appeared behind him. The tang of broken lily-stems, the ash of bitter burned salt. The shadows that won’t be washed out by neon-hues, by blazing white. Freckles on thin wrists, and the inkstain-lines of some kind of bar-code-style marking, nothing he understands in the sense of why and how. Instead he understands these shadows in terms of their presence, in terms of letting in the world or letting it out. The old vanished bloodstains, the old healed sutures.

He aches and aches even as he welcomes the voice that whispers to him. The presence that fumbles in the scant inch-spaces between them -- hands leaden-moving, and then the soft drowned rustle of plastic and tight-sealed foil. 

Glimpses. That’s all that he gets, that’s all that he wants. The flimsy confirmation of that person. Lights catching, not in the washed-away gold of that person’s hair, but in the bruising shadows deep beneath his beautiful hooded eyes, purple and blue and defeated in equal measure. The gaunt elegance of his cheeks, the faint clang of metal-movement catching in the angles of his face, silver-polished studs like they’re supposed to blend in with the freckles. Shapes of inverted spiral-armed galaxies along the planes of his throat, the line of his cheek. A last stubborn smear of shining gloss clinging to the corner of his mouth.

That -- might be a good idea, and he turns in that person’s arms. Meets that weary-sweet smile with a shadowy one of his own. “Prompto,” he says, wondering if he’ll even be heard over the mess of the music, the hollering laughter in the corners of this space. 

“Ignis,” is the answer he gets. The sounds of his own name, cutting through everything else.

So does the sight of the thing that Prompto is holding up to him, pinched elegantly in the tremble of his fingertips. Four sides, clumsy rounded corners, the letters that ought to have been embossed onto the pill rubbed away. Visibly crumbling into dust. 

Ignis racks his memories of the last hour, and comes up with -- blank. Can’t remember how many he’s already had in this night. This pill, this Prompto, might be the reasons why he can’t remember moving -- why he can’t pay attention to the music -- why he can’t remember where the pieces of him have gone.

How much easier it is to breathe, he thinks, now he can’t remember. Now he can’t focus.

Still. He -- tries to be good, for his own shaky definitions of it, at least where Prompto is concerned, and he fumbles a hand away from the shapes of Prompto’s ribs -- how to pull free, from where he’d been clinging? Plunges into his own pocket and -- yes, he still has his flask on him. It’s still not empty. A swallow of barrel-smoke. 

“You might need that.” It shouldn’t move him -- after all, that smile is too familiar. All the edges in it of bitterness, all the sliversharp scars bordering. Same shapes, same edges, as Ignis’s own smiles in a mirror, when he forces himself to look. 

He shakes his head, in the here and now. Leans forward, mouth falling open to breathe against Prompto’s cheek. He can’t feel how warm he is; he can’t feel how warm Prompto is. Liquor-drip from the corner of that downturned mouth. “Please.”

He ought to recoil from the taste of chemical ashes. Bitter, bitter, dissolving far too quickly on his tongue, too potent a hit, too much too soon -- he swallows it dry, chokes on the cough and -- Prompto is turning him around again. Bracing him again. Hands drifting, and Ignis can only feel the weight of spread fingers. Heel of a hand over the sudden hammering of his heart; fingertips sliding past his layers. Skin against skin, anchoring him in that one particular intersection of his nerves. He can feel the impulses exploding rattling down the straining spans of his own flesh, his own bones.

How many breaths pass, how many beats, before he can take an actual breath? Not quite bound in these narrow rooms of his senses, the splintering walls of his thoughts. 

How many before he remembers, before he turns his head and tries to kiss the question into freckled cheeks? “You?”

He doesn’t get an answer, not in words. His eyes lock, slowly, on Prompto’s heavy-falling eyelids. Mouth open, mirroring Ignis’s own actions from only moments earlier. Pills, multiple, balancing on that pink tongue, already dissolving -- which may account for the gasps and then the curl of him, the shocked deep breath and -- swallow. The movement of his throat that Ignis watches. He’s fascination, he’s thrall, to Ignis’s avid eyes.

Is this what it’s like to -- fall and fall and never come up for air again, never want to?

Impulses thundering through him, out of order, out of filter, and he pulls Prompto into the tight circle of his arms -- away from the lights, away from the pounding music and he whispers, he tries to find the voice that Prompto will recognize in his haze. “Let me in. Will you let me in?”

Now he sounds so small and so distant, when he says, “Ignis.”

“It’s me,” he says, although he also doubts his own answer, when he’s still washed out, he’s still navigating the terrifying high, and then there’s the part of his brain that’s telling him to watch out for the inevitable. The crash, the breakdown, the rejection. Walking away into a sullen morning and a sun that couldn’t warm him, that couldn’t cast a light onto his feet -- let alone the path that he needs to take. 

What path is that anyway, he wonders. Where would it lead him? Would it take him back to the ones he can’t have? Would it take him back to the start of all of this? Shuttered eyes and heavy hands and glittering lies. Stained windows full of false idols.

He almost expects purple and blue to turn blank and mocking, when Prompto opens his eyes again -- and it’s still a surprise to find his tears and the scars of his honest regard. “Hi.” Shivering. Wary. 

Ignis can respect that last part, and he says, one more time, “Let me in.” 

Alignment, too natural, too easy, and the bitterness lingering on Prompto’s mouth, compounding his own, as he presses the first kiss into him, as he chases his high straight into Prompto’s.

There are hands hooking into his hair, and he doesn’t want to protest the rough treatment. The bite and the burn of Prompto seizing at him. This is welcome, this is what he needs. Teeth-edges over his lips over his tongue. Soft stuttering sounds, his hands spasming around the base of Prompto’s neck. The way Prompto yields and then -- breathes, moans into him and then flips the kiss around, and Ignis would whisper encouragement to him if he weren’t drowning, if he weren’t willingly chasing the impact of Prompto all along his wrecked nerves. 

Down, down, drinking each other down in a kind of blind desperation -- except for the sound of ripping.

And then it’s like someone’s screamed straight into Ignis’s ears, and he pulls away, shocked breaths pounding at his ribs. Eyes falling to dangling threads, to the sudden conspicuous loss of small buttons. The cuff on his sleeve dangling. 

Eyes catching once again on the hectic shock in Prompto’s eyes, the twist in his mouth and -- 

“Don’t you dare,” he hears himself say. 

“I -- I can’t laugh? Is that it?” 

But the sound that tears out of Prompto is loud enough to drown out the world -- exactly halfway to a sob -- 

Ignis feels his hands shake where they’ve come back to Prompto’s shoulders -- feels the two of them shaking, swaying, falling into each other’s arms and he can feel nails, he can’t get away from them -- he doesn’t want to be freed of them. 

Which is why he tells himself he’s holding on to Prompto, which is why he hopes he’ll be forgiven this desperate grip, shoulders trembling in his clutching hands as he leads them through the jostle and the crush of the dance floor. Lights catching on the grimacing hard angles of strangers.

Door, and the stink of smoke and sweat, and -- shaking his way free of the club. 

But he refuses to be free of freckles. Of hands in tattered fingerless gloves, still wrapped around his wrists. The exposed skin of that arm -- for a moment he’s caught and helpless on the ripple of biting wet wind that makes the tendons and the veins and the ink waver -- or is that the pill? The dose he’s actually had and the leftovers he’s swallowed from kissing Prompto?

Speaking of whom -- glance at those shadowed lines, those shadowed angles, downcast all at once and he doesn’t hide the hitch in his own breath. “It’s fine. I don’t care. It’s not important.”

“Didn’t mean to,” he thinks he hears Prompto say. 

“That’s right. You didn’t mean to. So it’s okay.”

“No coats.”

Ignis blinks, and thinks about it, and -- the wind chooses that moment to howl, and now he can actually feel the edges of the rain -- Prompto pulls away from him, then, looks determined. 

“Wait,” he says.

“No, I. I need to do something about this right?”

“Need? No one said anything about -- ”

All his words die in his mouth as Prompto pulls things out of his pockets. A baggie makes sense, that’s where the pills have been all along -- but a thick wad of bills?

“Do I want to know?” He tries to speak gently, over the haze, over the chill of the weather that gnaws at his skin.

Prompto doesn’t speak. A minute shake of his head. The wind tears mercilessly at his hair, strands whipping every which way, and when a lone car speeds past the headlights catch him in something very like a halo, ragged around the edges.

Not the first time Ignis has seen him like this, not the first time they’re looking at each other on the desolation of an empty sidewalk. Even the street-light that flickers drunkenly overhead seems almost familiar. 

And he thinks, once again, that there is something beautiful in Prompto, wrecked ashore as he is, even if the single thing they have in common is -- rough days, rough nights, shuttered eyes and shattered hearts. Hours upon hours of their nightmares, twisting next to each other, trying and failing to fall asleep. Waking up smothered in tears, in fragmented words. 

Always those beds had been so -- narrow and uncomfortable. Nothing but thorns, nothing but painful spring-edges. 

He takes the bills and knows what he’s going to do, and he -- still offers Prompto the chance, the choice. He deserves these things. “Do you want to come with me?”

Blink. Blink. Disbelief in his eyes. “Where?”

He just tilts his head a little, and in the next instant a lightning-arc shatters the sky into a fan of light and shadow. “I don’t want to get caught out in that.”

Prompto shivers, and presses himself close, and Ignis pulls him in: and he’s inadequate shelter, he knows that, and he can still try, even if that means bearing the brunt of the wind as it continues to scream, the brunt of the night that overwhelms his bones and the thoughts spinning in his head.

“Okay,” he hears, softly, brushed against his chest, and -- Ignis kisses the whispers of his hair on the move.

Perhaps they’re just stealing some kind of false hope out of the night, because there’s a lost-looking driver in a lost-looking cab idling on the next corner and -- Ignis peels off two bills and gives him the first address that he can think of.

Which gets him a rear-view-mirror squint. “Sir.”

Even that word seems out of place here. 

“I’ll give you extra if you get us there fast -- and also if you don’t talk.”

He only meets Prompto’s eyes when they’re properly underway. The haze is still heavy on his shoulders, in his mouth, Ignis thinks: but the rest of him is a little less unmoored. A little more present, enough that the words come out of him laced with clear surprise. “They’re gonna stop us right at the doors.”

“They won’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Forget the name. Forget the lights. The floors. The statues. Not important,” Ignis raises his hand between them. Highway lights catching on the wide rubber band holding the wad of bills together. “This is the only thing they’re looking for.”

“I -- you. You’re sure about that. Did you -- ”

Now he presses two fingertips to Prompto’s mouth -- not to stop him talking. Just to reassure him. “I’ve done worse, I’ve been so much worse, in those rooms. And I gave them money and they went away.”

“I don’t want to hear it,” Prompto says, still leaning into his hand.

“I couldn’t -- I wasn’t going to tell you. You’d walk away from me, if you knew. You’d run.”

Sharp edges once again appear in Prompto’s face as he smiles. He looks -- colorless and wrong, like he knows they’re walking around the edges of each other again. “Sounds familiar.”

He thinks his answering smile is too mocking, too honest for the two of them, in this shadowed cab, as the city streets narrow and brighten, as the lightning streaks again and again.

Prompto shrugs, in his arms. Twist of his mouth, and it could almost be a smile, too, but it vanishes the instant the cab comes to a stop, and there’s a person in a gaudy red coat moving to open the door. 

The money disappears into various pockets -- driver, front desk, staff -- “Kind of them to leave us enough for breakfast,” he says, eventually, when the elevator spills them out onto an empty floor. 

Ignis lets Prompto stare, eyes wide open all the way down the plush corridor, the flowers drooping in huge urns -- and then there’s only just the one door to open, and -- 

Years since he’s seen the view out those windows. But he’s not turning toward them -- maybe he’d be looking at the storm, if he had come here with someone who isn’t Prompto, someone who isn’t standing stock-still next to him in the here and now. Clouds in his eyes, shadows of lightning-strike winging across the freckles and the lines of him.

He wants to fall into this boy. The tattered edges of him, the faltering light of him. The crash is inevitable, but he can ignore that in favor of Prompto walking towards the windows. The stop-and-start of his steps, the unsteady track of his head. The hands opening and closing and clawing. The way he reaches out to the glass between him and this city, dirty windows and narrow lanes. Soulless steel and moldering stone. 

Lash of the storm, now: wind and thunder and rain, to drown out this place.

Flashes, faster than a breath and faster than a blink, that catch and catch in Prompto’s skin, and Ignis can only glimpse him. The presence of him, slight and safe only because of walls and windows and otherwise he’d be blown over, he’d be beaten down -- that’s their normal state, Ignis thinks, that’s who he is, that’s who Prompto is.

“Fucking house of cards.”

The words roll toward him in the wake of lightning-crack -- it might have struck him, too, it was so clear and so close -- and he has to listen to the hushed echoes to figure out the words, to figure out the emotions. 

He has to reach out and touch to make sure that Prompto’s still here, too -- 

Tremors running through him, and the tension of waiting for the thunder, waiting for the roar of that release -- 

“Ignis?”

“Prompto,” he says, and he closes the distance between them. 

Ugly flush in those cheeks, distorting the lines of him. The heat that he’s radiating. The softly audible crack of the joints in his fingers.

“Do you want to -- talk?” Ignis asks, softly. “Pretend it’s not me. I can, I can just be someone else -- ”

Again his name cuts through. “Ignis.”

He straightens his shoulders in response. “Yes.”

“I want to burn this whole world down.”

He can only laugh, helpless, truthful. “I’d let you do it.”

“Don’t you want to? Do it?”

“More than anything. But I would stand back, and let you.”

“I almost believe you.”

Prompto’s hand around his is hard and hot and small, and it squeezes at him with astonishing force. Holds him in place like he’s grown roots, and still he sways towards the furious light wavering in those eyes. Still he’s caught on the echo of that phrase, as good as an obscenity that had spilled out of Prompto’s mouth. 

Not the first time he’s heard it, not the first time he’s clamped his teeth shut on his questions.

Prompto never asks him about it, either, when he says it, in the aftermath of too many cheap drinks, in a sullen passive not-smile.

“Are we ever going to talk about it?” he hears Prompto ask, in the here and now.

“If you want,” he says, “I know I can try. But I don’t know if I’ll be able to.”

Broken chuckle in response. “Yeah -- that’s what it’s like for me too. I could start now. Problem is, will I finish? Will I make sense? I can’t. Not, not possible.”

“Not even if I got you even better drugs,” he doesn’t quite suggest.

“Not even. I’ll take them and OD and never get started.”

“Yes.”

He doesn’t move, doesn’t get out of the way, when Prompto suddenly falls sideways into him -- simply catches him, like he’s coming free of the strings that had been holding him upright. “Do you -- want to keep looking out?” 

“No,” almost a whisper -- and Ignis turns toward him just in time for the surge of his kiss, the desperate words falling against his skin. “I don’t want to think, I don’t want to feel, I don’t I can’t -- ”

And that’s all the permission they can demand from each other, really, all they can still give: and he leads Prompto over to the bed. “Do you want another?”

“I think I want all of it,” is the slow, too-low response. “If I could get away with it, if I could survive it -- ”

Ignis shakes his head, only a little, and he takes the baggie from Prompto’s trembling hand. Shakes out four pills precisely -- two for himself, and the others he presses onto Prompto’s tongue.

He listens for the loud swallow -- tosses his own back -- lunges forward as soon as he feels the first earthquake-rush of the hit, as soon as he catches the burn in his nerves, licking right into the back of his brain -- Prompto goes down beneath him, willing, pleading eyes -- Ignis sifts blond hair away from the rage in that freckled face and says: “Not until you say yes.”

“Say yes too.” Words, torn and ragged. “You too.”

“I’ll say yes to you, Prompto,” he says, whispering, almost straight through into a kiss. “I will.”

“Then -- yes, Ignis, yes -- ”

Prompto doesn’t quite yield -- Ignis winces when the kisses turn biting-desperate -- and keeps going. Hands raking down his sides that he twists into instead of away from. The sound of his other cuff being torn away is just as loud here as it had been in the club. 

Beneath him, Prompto smiles like he’s swinging a knife for Ignis’s heart. Words like spurs and whips, spilling from his lips like blood. “You too. It’s okay. Who else but -- but us? You and me -- ”

The words shouldn’t make sense -- 

Ignis rips the shirt clean off Prompto’s torso, ragged pieces that tear far too easily -- bites kiss-bruises down his ribs, over the heaving surfaces of his chest, Prompto’s laughter a bittersweet taste stuck sharp between his teeth -- down, further, clank of a threadbare belt falling away, the expanses of his skin, flies coming undone and the shipwrecked pitch and roll of Prompto’s hips. 

Ignis sits up and he can feel his muscles burning, one hand to hold both of Prompto’s wrists -- “Say the word I’ll let you up,” he says, trying to gentle his voice once again. 

Hectic, hectic, the sweet grimace that plays around Prompto’s mouth. “I will, I trust you.”

“I wish I knew why,” he says, but softly, but kindly, and he kisses the words into the corner of Prompto’s eye.

“I know why, I, I just can’t tell you.”

“Fair enough.”

And -- right outside the windows the storm finally crashes in, like it had just been waiting for them to almost settle -- and he startles, he sees Prompto startle, with the impact. Fierce wind and fierce rain, wind driving water, the world vanishing in sideways-slanted lines. Lightning-burn and thunder-cry, too close, running through him like spears -- the storm sounds exactly like glass shattering and he almost expects the windows to fall into ragged cruel edges.

So he turns away from that and the memory of blank knowing eyes -- 

Towards Prompto, and the shift in his face, where he’s -- maybe he’s walking the edges of lucid, if the tears shaking unshed on his eyelashes are any indication. Downtrodden shadows bruising his mouth.

Ignis pushes limp blond strands away, and kisses him, and tastes Prompto’s tears: iron-ashen bitterness. Not that that stops him -- he drinks down the last dregs of their shared high, and -- he lets Prompto snatch half a breath before he kisses him harder. 

A half-strangled sound against his tongue, like a plea, like a burning need -- he’s been waiting for it -- he’d let Prompto see his smile if they had time, if he could spare a thought -- he can’t let up, he can’t let go, there’s no point in letting go now.

So he opens his mouth against the juncture of Prompto’s throat and shoulder. Quick warning scrape of teeth -- and the sound that he can all but taste, as close to a laugh as he’s ever managed to wring out of this beautiful bleeding wreck of a man -- and he lets his hands wander, too, at the same time. The heaving expansion of his chest, the violent tremble in his belly -- and lower still -- cutting off the low obscenities that had been falling from Prompto’s mouth.

Sweet filth that only makes him smile, that only makes him stroke more firmly -- he holds Prompto’s hips down with his free arm, and in a moment between the gasps he murmurs, “How do you want me?”

Eyes blown wide wide wide when he looks up. “Ignis?”

“Prompto.”

His eyes must now be the only source of light in this room, Ignis thinks: and even the storm’s power catches in him, glows and glows and he’s still only a taper-flame on the very brink of guttering into wan smoky fumes, but he’s exactly the kind of light Ignis wants. Exactly the kind of light he can think of deserving, in this torn world, in the ashes of his heart. 

And he bares himself to that flickering light: crawls back up to him and kisses him, eyes wide open, taking in the shock of him. “Please.”

There’s still a roughness to the way Prompto lays him out on the bed, but he -- can catch himself on those edges and smile, and keep going. Keep wanting. Lifting into the way Prompto touches him, teetering and knowing all at once, because this isn’t the first time and yet he still looks like it will all be torn away from him.

He knows that feeling, too, and he twists into every touch every kiss every scratch. Fingers opening him up and he welcomes the burn of them -- welcomes the fleeing pain, like he can’t get enough of it, as Prompto sucks in a breath and sounds like he’s being ripped to pieces in the process -- his moans like a song, beautiful enough to capture Ignis, until all his thoughts are stolen away, until Prompto takes a grip on his thighs and sinks into him, slow sweet agony. 

Half-command that Prompto bites out against his cheek -- it overwhelms him, and the ragged forgetting at the edges of his senses: “Don’t -- don’t touch yourself. Let me -- I’ll be -- I wanna do this for you -- ”

Can’t answer for the sudden drive into him, for the sudden plunge of bottoming out, that yanks all his breath and all his reason away.

Losing track of moment after moment, and nothing else to hang on to but Prompto, the splintering shattering sweetness of him -- nothing else to think of. Nothing else to remember. World falling away and he’s grateful for it, grateful to have no choice, losing himself in a storm of his own making and of Prompto’s. Rolling hips, soft whispered desperate cries -- what would be the point of muffling themselves now? -- the barbed and hooked remnants of their shared high, the poisons coursing through all their thoughts through all their veins --

Closer, closer, the lightning comes and it’s about to burn him clean out of his senses, clean out of the prison of his mind, and when he catches a breath and hears Prompto groan out his name -- it’s like a different kind of clarity. It’s not the unwanted kind. It doesn’t taste like defeat or the disgusting fuzz on his tongue as he’s struggling up and out of sleep.

It’s as much a comfort as the sudden press of fingers against his own, the powerful grip of Prompto -- strong and now soft, all throughout this night when they’d only ever been groping at each other, when they’d only ever been holding on to each other like unraveling lifelines or the fraying cables of a shipwreck.

No, this is -- this is different and he forces his eyes open, entirely breathlessly difficult when he’s nearly at the clawing edge -- this is falling but not falling alone, and why is that a comfort, why does that make any kind of sense, why does he want to hold on to this moment? 

Why is this the moment that he wants to disappear into, when he feels himself tipping over that beautiful razor-sharp abyss -- when he can trace every line of Prompto’s twisted expression and understand that he’s smiling -- 

Breath and thoughts punched out of him in the next instant: Prompto stills, doesn’t quite shout, and the voice of him is louder than thunderstorms anyway, frozen in the moment of his climax.

The last thought that crashes through Ignis’s mind is -- the bittersweet piercing regret of this moment, that must run away from him and from both of them -- and does he fall? Does he finish? He can only hear himself sobbing, at the end, and the echo of another mourning --

**Author's Note:**

> I took inspiration for the visuals of this fic from the original MV for the song Run, by BTS: watch [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKysONrSmew).  
> And the emotional atmosphere is connected to another BTS song, House of Cards: watch a live stage [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDLXVbP3CQc).
> 
> *****
> 
> ninemoons42 on Twitter: [@ninemoons42](https://twitter.com/ninemoons42)


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